Hugh Gusterson

Title:	Professor of International Affairs and Anthropology
Faculty:	Full-Time
Office:	1957 E St., room 213
Email:	guster@email.gwu.edu

Areas of Expertise

Militarism, nuclear culture, anthropology of science, ethics, international security, public anthropology, methods.

Background

Dr. Gusterson’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the conditions under which particular bodies of knowledge are formed and deployed, with special attention to the science of war, the military, and nuclear weapons. His research addresses the problem of how to understand knowledge as a cultural formation, and how to analyze the historical and structural transformations of science and technology. He asks questions such as: How do cultures of science initiate and shape participants? How can we critically assess universalist claims about scientific and military “truths?” How do scientists justify their complicity with the projects of nation-statets?

Education

PhD. 1992, Stanford University
M.A. 1986, Stanford University
M.Sc. 1982, University of Pennsylvania
B.A. 1980 (Modern History), Cambridge University, first class Honours

Publications

Books

2016 Gusterson, H. Drone: Remote Control Warfare. Boston: MIT Press, 2016.

2010 Anderson, D.S., H. Gusterson. Understanding Teen Drinking Cultures in America. (Report to The Century Council). Fairfax, VA: George Mason University

2009 Gusterson, H., and C. Besteman, eds. The Insecure American. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press.

2009 Union of Concerned Scientists (1 of 3 lead editors). The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual: Or, Notes on Demilitarizing American Society. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

2005 Besteman, C., and H. Gusterson, eds. Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back. Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press.

2004 Gusterson, H. People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

1999 Weldes, J., M. Laffey, H. Gusterson, and R. Duvall, eds. Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

1996 Gusterson, H. Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

2014 Gusterson, H. “Toward an anthropology of drones.” In M. Evangelista and H. Shue, eds., The American Way of Bombing: Changing Ethical and Legal Norms from Flying Fortresses to Drones. Cornell Univ. Press, pp. 191-206.

2012 Gusterson, H. “Can the insurgent speak?” In T. Barkawi and K. Stanski, eds., Orientalism and War. Hurst, pp. 83-104.

2008 Gusterson, H. “Nuclear futures: Anticipatory knowledge, expert judgment, and the lack that cannot be filled,” Science and Public Policy 35(8): 551-560.

2008 Gusterson, H. “Paranoid potbellied Stalinist gets nuclear weapons: How the U.S. print media cover North Korea,” Nonproliferation Review 15(1): 21-42.

2001 Gusterson, H. “The virtual nuclear weapons laboratory in the New World Order,” American Ethnologist 28 (1): 417-437.

1999 Gusterson, H. “Feminist militarism,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 22(2): 17-26.

1999 Gusterson, H. “Missing the end of the Cold War in international security." In J. Weldes, M. Laffey, H. Gusterson & R. Duvall, eds., Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger. Univ. of Minnesota Press, pp. 319-345.

1999 Gusterson, H. “Nuclear weapons and the other in the Western imagination,” Cultural Anthropology 14(1): 111-143.

Distinctions

2016 Buchdahl Lectureship, North Carolina State University
2014-15 Resident scholar, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
2014 Scholar's Award, National Science Foundation
2013-15 President-elect, American Ethnological Society
2013 President’s Award, American Anthropological Association

Classes Taught

Anth 1002 Sociocultural Anthropology
Anth 6391 Topics: Capitalism and Neoliberalism

Last updated June 13, 2016

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